The Service Availability Forum (SAF) is a consortium of several computing and telecommunications companies that develops, publishes, promotes, and provides education on open specifications that standardize high availability platforms. The solution which is offered by SAF facilitates high availability alongside service continuity. It also enables the use of Commercial-Of-The-Shelf (COTS) and improves the portability of hardware and software components. SAF members have developed a set of specifications that describe various services that when implemented form a complete middleware for high-availability. A set of application programming interfaces (APIs) has also been defined to standardize the interface between the applications and the middleware that implements SAF specifications (that we refer to as a SAF middleware). The SAF specifications are divided into the Application Interface Specification (AIS) (see, e.g., Service Availability Forum, Application Interface Specification. Availability Management Framework SAI-AIS-AMF-B.04.01), which defines several services required for the high-availability of applications, and the Hardware Platform Interface (HPI) (see, e.g., Service Availability Forum, Hardware Platform Interface SAI-HPI-B.03.02), which provides standard means to control and monitor hardware components.
The Availability Management Framework (AMF) is part of the AIS middleware, which is responsible for managing the availability of the services provided by an application. AMF achieves this by maintaining redundant components of an application and by dynamically shifting a workload of faulty components to the healthy ones; all according to a configuration provided to AMF as an input.
AMF configuration generation is the process of designing a configuration for a software system that is controlled by an implementation of AMF. Such a system may be provided by the vendors, and preferably satisfies a set of configuration requirements specified by the configuration designer. One skilled in the art will appreciate that vendors do not always provide such information, and in a multi-supplier environment no single resource is able to provide this information.
The design of AMF configurations typically requires 1) the descriptions of software resources to be used, and 2) the requirements that specify the services to be provided and their characteristics in AMF terms. Due to the numerous parameters that should be taken into consideration, the design of AMF configurations is a complex and error prone task if done manually. Also, the relationships among different configuration entities constrain the admissible values of various parameters and attributes.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a system and method that obviate or mitigate the above described problems